Art House Co-op

Guerilla Spring

This week’s final installation of the 10 x 10 Series is a chance to really go wild with your creative impulses, share some artistic joy with others, and even cultivate a little mystery in a public space.

The Mystery Project doesn’t put any restrictions on what kind of art you make, as long as you document it in a 4 x 6 photo. Even better? You get a free “mystery color” Prismacolor Brush l Fine Art Marker to work with, as well as a word prompt to guide your work. It’s been our hope that the 10 x 10 Series has stimulated all its participants’ minds to think about art and the creative process in new ways each week. Now’s your chance to figure out which project, medium, prompt, or process got YOU thinking the most.

The choice of what to create is yours!

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The idea of putting art in public spaces is not a new one, however. Often called “street art” or “guerilla art,” this kind of work inverts the concept of “found art” (typically, art created with found materials) by leaving artwork behind for others to find. One of the coolest things about anonymously left public art is the ability it gives artists to inspire others by allowing them to encounter beauty or the unexpected in places they wouldn’t normally.

Here are some fun examples of works that guerilla artists leave behind to brighten strangers’ days, provoke thought, and make the world just a little more interesting.

1. Chalk Drawings

Springtime means the weather’s warmer, and folks are more likely to be out and about on the streets, walking instead of driving, and spending more time in public places. Chalk drawings are a great way for artists of any age to bring some color to these public walkways. Leave an inspirational message for someone to stumble upon. Trace your footsteps. Create a design. Leave a series of arrows for people to follow. The options are endless.

Below are some beautiful examples from artist Julian Beever, an English artist whose chalk drawings notably give the illusion of 3-dimensional objects or scenes.

2. ZINES!

A zine is a form of homemade publication, usually in pamphlet form. Many contain stories, poems, articles, drawings, doodles, manifestos, and cartoons. Usually they’re  circulated by artists leaving them in public spaces, which might be a fun approach to The Mystery Project. Leave one on a restaurant table. Stick one in a library book. Drop a stack at your local coffee shop. Brighten someone’s day and leave them wondering … “who made this?!”

Here are some beautiful examples of handmade zines on ETSY.

3. Environmental Installations

Environmental installations are a really cool way to surprise and delight passersby, and typically involve creating ephemeral sculptures or patterns with natural and found materials. Another great thing about environmental installations? They may not cost you anything to create. Leave a thoughtful stone sculpture or pile for someone to wonder at. Create a pattern by braiding long grasses. Make a teepee out of twigs on top of a boulder or in the middle of a woodland path.

Here are some stunning examples of well-known environmental works:

[Clemson clay nest by Nils-Udo (2005) via designboom]

[by Helsinki artist Jonna Pohjalainen]

[“Tight Chalk Spiral” by Martin Waters]

There are so many other ways to break out of your normal artistic boundaries and go guerilla with this project.

Here are a few more ideas of kinds of works to leave out and about:

- a message in a bottle

- a hand written or pictographic recipe

- a treasure map or hunt for someone to follow

- a photograph

- a good luck charm

- a fortune …

We hope you’re inspired to place your art out in the world, and that you do join us for:

What happens when you make a stranger’s day?

This week’s final free project in the 10 x 10 Series is an exploration of the unexpected. Every participant will receive a mystery project kit, which includes a free Prismacolor Brush l Fine Art Marker in a surprise color and a secret word to guide your work. Create a token of inspiration using the tools in your kit — it could be a drawing, a zine, a sculpture, or a collage — then install it in a public place for a stranger to discover. Just remember to document your mystery project and send us a photograph! We’ll share your creative surprises with the entire community online.

Click here to participate!

What do you do in a day?

This week’s 10 x 10 Series installment, The Chronicle Project, begs the question: “What do I do in a day?”

The answer to this question is of course not a simple one. When examining the myriad small movements, thoughts, decisions, actions, and moments one spends throughout the course of an entire day, it seems almost impossible to contemplate recording all of it. That’s okay. One of the most fun aspects of this project is the ability to choose a lens with which to record time passing, and the manner in which you spend it. 

Since we’re challenging participants to chronicle “Everything I [BLANK] in a day,” there is a chance to focus in on one aspect of your daily life, and bring it to the fore in poetic prose or funny lists, vibrant photographs or infographics, timelines, or maps.

Here are some examples of chronicles we find especially interesting (along with some prompts for you to try!), which will hopefully get your wheels turning and set you off on your creative chronicling adventures.

1. Photographic Chronicles

These images appear on blog: The Daily Map, from the Cine Tourist, a website about the connections between maps and films, and local cinema. Featured on this blog are chronological stills clipped from film scenes that feature maps. 

• LENS FOR THE CHRONICLE: maps in a film
• TIME SPAN OF CHRONICLE: length of film scene
• MEDIUM: photo stills
• PROMPT FOR YOU BASED ON THIS INSPIRATION: using photography stills, chronicle all the times you write something down over the course of a day

It’s difficult to ascertain who took this photograph, but it’s one of the most stunning examples of time-lapse star trail photography on the ‘net. It shows the movements of stars throughout an entire night, for an intriguing effect that’s almost dizzying if you look at it too long.

Sam Javanrouh is the man behind top photography blog daily dose of imagery, and a talented photographer in his own right. Javanrouh created the top time-lapse photo out of six photos shot in about a two hour time frame in downtown Toronto. To achieve this effect, Javanrouh uses ‘Pclix’, a device that allows you to trigger the shutter of your digital camera at much shorter intervals than is possible manually.

2. Image-based, Infographic, & Mapped Chronicles

From the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new show Common Places: Printing, Embroidery and the Art of Global Mapping, this map uses images in an organized grid to show the passage of time, and the growth of the United States as an entity. Here’s a bit about this chronicle from the art site Hyperallergic: 

“Bedcover,” is a 1912 work by Mrs. Charles Elwell. It consists of over 600 “silkies” stitched together. The squares’ content represents a United States rising to power, with American Indian leaders and American state flowers on the one hand and foreign flags on the other. All of them surround a giant American flag, which had to be updated with additional stars when Arizona and New Mexico joined the union. Though there’s no sign of Alaska or Hawai’i.”

• LENS FOR THE CHRONICLE: rise & development of the United States, as a country
• TIME FRAME FOR THE CHRONICLE: couple hundred years
• MEDIUM: images, embroidery
• PROMPT FOR YOU BASED ON THIS INSPIRATION: using a grid pattern, create a chronicle in images of everything round-shaped that you look at during a day (you can create your grid design based on things like time, things you like versus do not like, things you would want to touch versus not, etc)

And here we have Adolf Konrad’s graphic packing list, Dec. 16, 1973 (courtesy of Ferdinand Konrad papers, 1962-2002).

• LENS FOR THE CHRONICLE: things one packs for a trip
• TIME FRAME FOR THE CHRONICLE: time it takes to plan for a trip and/or pack
• MEDIUM: hand-drawn images, watercolor, infographics
• PROMPT FOR YOU BASED ON THIS INSPIRATION: sketch or paint all the things you put into or take out of your bag (purse, handbag, backpack, etc) over the course of one day.

3. Text-based Chronicles

Above is Harry Bertoia’s ‘My-self Rating Chart’ school assignment (courtesy of the Harry Bertoia papers, 1917-1979). While the timeline aspect of this chronicle isn’t perhaps as readily noticeable as others, there is a visual timeline of sorts that presents itself both in the visual vertical line of this chart, as well as what it represents: his perception of himself, in this one moment of time.

• LENS FOR THIS CHRONICLE: personal qualities
• TIME FRAME FOR THIS CHRONICLE: the time it took to complete the self-assessment
• MEDIUM: paper, pencil or ink (can’t tell)
• PROMPT FOR YOU BASED ON THIS INSPIRATION: chronicle your attitude or mood as it changes (or not) over the course of one day in a list or venn diagram

Above: Pablo Picasso’s recommendations for the Armory Show for Walt Kuhn, 1912, is a great display of a list made for things someone ELSE should do in a day. (Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.)

• LENS FOR THIS CHRONICLE: art exhibits a friend should see
• TIME FRAME FOR THIS CHRONICLE: the time it takes a friend to actually check the exhibits out (e.g. an indeterminate time in the future)
• MEDIUM: paper, pencil
• PROMPT FOR YOU BASED ON THIS INSPIRATION: Make a list of all the things you wish you could do in one day; or; make a list of all the things you think you might be doing on a day one year from now

Here’s a timeline found on the site Spreading Jam, which chronicles the launch of “Important Internet Stuff.” 

• LENS FOR THIS CHRONICLE: the launch of seminal internet sites & services
• TIME FRAME FOR THIS CHRONICLE: 1993-2009
• MEDIUM: graph paper, pen
• PROMPT FOR YOU BASED ON THIS INSPIRATION: chronicle in a time line your “firsts” throughout an entire day (eyes first open, first word spoken, first time putting feet on the floor, first time drinking, eating, sitting, etc)

4. And last but not least:

24 hours. 1,440 minutes. Or 86,400 seconds.

The Chronicle Project challenges artists to document a single day in their lives and share it with our community. Choose to create a visual record, describe your day in narrative form or depict your path as a chart or map — just make sure to limit your focus to a single 24-hour span. Keep track of something specific, like every sound you hear, or attempt to capture your overall impression of a day. The only restriction is that your work must fold down to a size of 4” x 6”. We’ll exhibit the resulting chronicles in the Brooklyn Art Library and collapse 1,000 unique days into one.

Click here to participate!

Everyone Needs a Little Love

This week we feel inspired by The Note Swap to give our fellow humans — strangers or not — a little love. Sometimes it’s the anonymous gesture that means the most. Whether or not a note is meant for us specifically, the personal nature of a letter has the power to move, change, and inspire us. 

In this spirit, we want to share with you some great online archives of anonymous notes, letters meant for others (which in turn, can mean something to us too), found photos, and other relics that have been shared, and in this sense, repurposed in order to inspire others. 

#1: PostSecret

PostSecret is one of the best-known community art projects (though it started as a simple blog), and is premised on the idea of sharing anonymous postcards with the secrets on them. The site reads: 

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

The project may have earned its following (currently the largest ad-free blog in the world!) in part because of the human voyeuristic impulse it indulges. However, we think the strength of these anonymous shared postcards is in their ability to touch others’ lives with their sincerity and emotion, and in the ability of the project to grant anyone permission to express themselves to others, without fear.

Here’s a smattering of recent posts that touched our hearts:

#2: Letters of Note 

From the website:

Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated as often as possible; usually each weekday.

While these notes weren’t intended for us specifically, they’re still somehow incredibly inspiring. Here’s as especially spirited one that we liked, from last month, that anyone who’s ever wanted a raise can relate to:

The great Al Hirschfeld had been supplying his much-loved caricatures to theNew York Times for 37 years when, in 1962, tipped over the edge by the newspaper’s accounting department, he sent the following amusing letter to the Sunday editor, Lester Markel.

His request for a raise was granted.

(Source: The Paper’s Papers: A Reporter’s Journeys Through the Archives of The New York Times; Image above: Al Hirschfeld in his studio, 1999, via.)

#3: Lists of Note

From the website:

Lists are created for all manner of reasons, and have been for many centuries. It’s my aim to feature some of the most notable examples right here.

Here’s one that rings with the free-spirited nature of its author. While its advice tailored towards prose writers and was written to someone else, we think it can easily inspire anyone setting out on a creative endeavor:

In 1958, Jack Kerouac wrote a letter to Don Allen. In closing, he included a 30-point list of “essentials” that he titled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” It read as follows.

(Source: Heaven and Other Poems; Image: Kerouac, courtesy of Beat is Back.)

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As ever, 
Jack

#4: Found Magazine

From the “ABOUT” section on this site:

We collect found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles– anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life. Anything goes.

We certainly didn’t invent the idea of found stuff being cool. Every time we visit our friends in other towns, someone’s always got some kind of unbelievable discovered note or photo on their fridge. We decided to make a bunch of projects so that everyone can check out all the strange, hilarious and heartbreaking things people have picked up and passed our way.

Here are some recent gems they’ve posted:

FOUND by Kelly in Princeton, Indiana. Found this inside a book I bought at the thrift store.

FOUND by Shannon in Nephi, Utah

Found this in a novelty restaurant, the kind where you order using a phone. At our booth was a small notebook, I imagine to write your order down before “calling.” Most of the pages were scrawled down choices from the menu, but on one page, was this.

FOUND by Ken and Jes in Texas. We found this on the street during a dog walk.

FOUND by Laura in Seattle, Washington

This While You Were Out message was found in a Seattle library book titled Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald in October, 2011.

#5: Flickr Group: “Found Love Letters”

A simple Google search led me to this group Flickr album called “Found Love Letters.” They are as you can imagine: full of emotion for someone unknown. Somehow this fact makes them all the more haunting, and ultimately, relatable. Here’s one posted by THE GENERATIONS PROJECT:

#6: And last but not least:

Trade handwritten notes across the globe

The Note Swap is a worldwide exchange of handwritten letters, contributed by a thousand creative people just like you. Join our community to swap surprises in the mail and take part in an experiment designed to make a stranger’s day. Scribble down a love note, a short story, a recipe, a memory, a joke or a secret — your letter could take any form. Simply mail your note to us along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. We’ll make the swap and send you another participant’s letter in return. Waiting for the mail can be the best part of your day…

Click here to participate!

The Art of the Response

As inspiration for The Photo Response Project — free project #6 in the 10 x 10 Series — we’ve decided to take a look at the role of “response” in the art making process. While addressing the role of response might harken to the proverbial query —  If a tree falls in the woods and no one witnesses it, does it make a sound? — we won’t wax too philosophical here, but rather share with you a two practical & creative ways that the “art of the response” can in fact become the art itself.

#1: THE EXQUISITE CORPSE

According to Wikipedia, an exquisite corpse is “is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule … or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.” Originally created by the Surrealists as a type of artistic parlour game, this process-oriented form of call & response art making has definitely remained part of the contemporary art milieu.

If drawing (or any kind of visual art) is the medium used in an exquisite corpse, then typically each artist will create something on a specific part of the paper or canvas, and it will be hidden from the next artist except for a few connecting lines to work off of. Here’s an example:

[Agnes deBETHUNE, Alaine BECKER, Leah K. TOMAINO, Untitled/Untitled/ Rooted, Graphite, collage, watercolor, chalk, pastel crayon, fiber, acrylic paint on paper, 2009, 30” x 22”. Courtesy of the artists and the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University.]

If poetry is the medium, it may look something like this communal poem composed by members of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University in South Bend. Note the “rule” for this exquisite corpse at the top:

Contemporary artists often play with this parlour game of yester years as well, as you can see by the graphic art posters created by D*Face, a London-based street artist:

#2: THE NEW YORKER CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

For all of you New Yorker readers, you know exactly what this is … but for those of you who don’t, the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest is part of a running feature in the magazine in which cartoon artists’ work is displayed, along with an open call for the best cartoon caption. Readers submit captions, and the powers at be choose the top three; then anyone can vote on which caption gets printed with the cartoon.

This is a great example of the power of the “call & response” method in marrying meaning to medium. Despite the stellar content of the publication, the witty cartoons — and especially the caption contest — remain one of The New Yorker’s most popular pieces of content. The art doesn’t just begin and end with one artist, one work, or one mind, but rather involves a larger conversation between many artists, many contributions, and many minds. 

Here are some examples of cartoons that are running in the March issues of the magazine:

For those of you interested in participating, here’s the cartoon up for caption submissions right now (click on the image to submit):

And for those who want to vote on the top three captions for this week’s cartoon, you can click on the images below to do so:

#3: AND OF COURSE, OUR OWN VERSION OF CALL & RESPONSE ART

What’s a picture worth to you?

1000 words? A quick sketch? Or a photo in return? The Photo Response Project asks artists to perform a visual translation. Choose one of these three photographs and respond to it in any visual medium — just keep the dimensions to 4” x 6”. Write a (very) short story, draw or paint, manipulate the image itself or simply try something new. We’ll exhibit each photograph together with its responses and explore the many directions that emerge from a single starting point.

CLICK HERE TO PARTICIPATE!